My maternal grandmother, Alice
Andersen, was born in Chicago
in 1906. My sister and mother found the house she was born in. She died in
August 1997. Her mother came through Ellis Island in 1896
at age 16, from Norway. She was from the town of Stange, farm country north of Christiana (near Hedemarken?). Her name was Anne Andersen, and she married
another Andersen, Carl, her first cousin. I have a painting of a waterfall
he did – a place on the border of Minnesota
and Iowa called Minnehaha falls. I don’t think it exists anymore.
They met in Minnesota and moved to Chicago together around 1900. My grandmother had many siblings
– I think eight. Carl's parents were prominent farmers and business people
in Minnesota – I have a drawing likeness of them both; they were
of course named Andersen. Land holdings were not given to my great-grandfather,
because he married his cousin and ran off to Chicago. He was a wood grainer by trade – making imitation wood
grain effects on walls and ceilings and so on. I vaguely remember my great
grandmother, Anne, whom my grandmother Alice took me to see several times
when I was very young – they lived close to each
other in Chicago; she died when I was 4 years old. My Aunt Lillian (Alice’s sister) visited Stange in
Norway and made a family tree which my mother must have. I
exchanged letters with a distant cousin of mine, Jan Rune Peterson, in Norway. He disappeared in the late 80s and they think he drowned
while swimming.

Walter Doepp
(pronounced “Depp”). He died when I was 2 years
and 2 months old, in 1966, so I don’t really remember him. He died of lung
cancer at age 66. His sister, my great-aunt Jeanette, lived in Florida and I visited her during my vision quest trip in March
1985. They were the only children of Jeanette (Jennie)
Crume and Walter
George Doepp, who was a carriage driver in Chicago. I have a picture of her, she was pretty, and kind of
looks like my wife Ellen. My father said she died of peritonitis contracted
while having an abortion, because they didn’t want (“couldn’t afford”) any
more children. That sounds a little fishy, as Catholics were willing to crank
out multiple kids. Her family hailed from McComb
in western Illinois, and before that Kentucky. There is a family genealogy for her line (the Crumes) that goes back through the Murray family of Kentucky
to a well-known patriot named John Hay (fought in
Revolutionary War) and therefore—supposedly—to Robert the Bruce in Scotland. My great grandmother Jennie Crume died when Jeanette
and Walter were small. My grandfather’s grandfather, a Doepp,
was involved in a Johnny Depp-like intrigue. It
is said that he eloped with the daughter of the Mayor of Buffalo New York
(name Denler/Denlir), and fled by steamer through the great lakes to Chicago. This would have been circa 1850s. They then had children
including Walter and John (John Doepp), who lived a long life and was an elevator
operator in a fancy hotel in Chicago in the 1920s-40s.

My grandmother always insisted that the Doepp
name was taken by Hugenot ancestors who were originally named Durugan (or D’ Rugan), indicating
a border country French heritage. There are several families of Doepps or Doeppes from border country
Switzerland; I met a guy from Switzerland named Doepp when I worked
at ILE in Boulder in 1999. He said there were two or three different families
in the region, with variant spellings on Doeppe
/ Deppe / Doepp. Durugan and variants are strangely scant in internet lists
of Hugenot exiles relocated to England – I think there was one D’Rogan
or D’Rougan, suggesting a French naming convention
“from Rougan.” One must look for a border town of
that name that, however, probably no longer exists, considering the Hugenotdiaspora. A town in France that just might be a place-name source of the name D’Rougan is Rouen. If this is pronounced in French with a guttural “ue” it could sound like “roo-gen”;
the family oral tradition passes “from Rouen” onward as “De Rougen.” (I have confirmed from a French speaker that Rouen is indeed pronounced as two syllables with a rough split
before -en.) It might not even have been a family name, but simply a memory
of where they were from; it is not clear why the name Doepp(e)
was taken as a replacement for an earlier Hugenot
name. As mentioned, there is a group of Doepp /
Depp families in Switzerland. Rouen in
France is near the Jura Mountains
that divide northeastern France from western Switzerland, which is the area that Algernon Blackwood wintered
in (town of Bole near Neuchatal). The Hugenots were persecuted. So my Walter Doepp grandfather’s
background appears to be German/Swiss/French via Doepp
and then Scotch/Irish via his mother (Crume).

My father’s mother, who died
in December 2003 at age 96, had Scotch/Irish ancestry via Moreland and Riffle
families. She also has a very interesting and well-documented line going back
to the Plantagenet rulers of England, and thus further back to the Merovingians.
I wrote about this in March 2002 in my document called Pharamond.
The family traces back from Riffle to Barnum, Barnham,
Lennard, Fiennes, Bouchier, etc,
to the Plantagenets. P. T. Barnum is a cousin on
the line. Thus it is possible for me to trace a direct genealogy back 51 generations
to the Merovingian ruler Pharamond. This all connects
into the Holy Blood, Holy Grail mystery of Mary Magdalene, made popular
recently by the bestseller The Da VinciCode.
Connection into this rulership line ultimately gives
access to many other ruling dynasties of Europe,
such as the Angevins, William
the Conqueror, the troubadors of Aquitane, and founding kings of France, Ireland, Finland, and Scotland.

Through William the Conqueror’s
line, we can trace backward with certainty to Rollo,
king of Normandy, and his father, Rognvald,
Earl of More, the mighty and wise in council. These early Norse kings are
mentioned in the ancient king lists recorded in Heimskringla
and the Saga of the Orkneyingers (cousins
founded and ruled the Orkney
Islands.) The mytho-historical line listed in the old sagas of the far north
begins with Fornjot,
king of Finland and Kvenland, who lived in
the late 6th century AD. The list seems reliable and includes colorful
ancestor names such as Ivar the Uplander’s Earl, Eystein the Noisy,
Gorr, and Sveidi the Sea
King. The name “King Gorr” jumped out at me, and
I remembered reading of a King Gorry (or King Orrey) in John Michel’s book At the Centre of the World.
In ancient times a King Orrey landed on the northern
shore of the Isle of Man, and when the native inhabitants questioned him as to
where he came from, he pointed back at the arching Milky Way and said “that
is where my country is.” There seems to have been at least one historically
documented ruler (11th century) who later took over the legend
and claimed the Royal Road (King Orrey’s highway)
as his own (this was a pilgrimage route into the central shrine at KeeilAbban, mirror of the Milky
Way overhead – today it is called Millennium Way). However, it is possible
that the original King Gorry was the King Gorr described as an explorer of the western isles in the
Orkneyinger Saga. King Gorr
was the great greatgreatgreatgreat grandfather of Rollo, king of Normandy, who was the great greatgreat grandfather of William the Conqueror (who in turn was
the grandfather of the Plantagenet brothers).

King Henry (Plantagenet) III,
son of King John (Lackland), did a ceremony with
a Holy Blood relic in 1247 AD; the relic was gifted
from the patriarch of Jerusalem. The subject is revealing of a continuing fascination
among the Plantagenets with “sacred blood” – see
book by Nicholas Vincent called The Holy Blood,
which discusses holy blood relics such as the one reported in Mantua (which
gave rise to the Order of the Precious Blood that managed St Joseph church
in Denver in the 1890s) as well as the Precious Blood relic in Bruges, Belgium.

My father’s father, who provides
the name-sake line of Jenkins, is traceable to early settlers in New England – a John Jenkins landing circa 1650 (although my father questions a possible
break). They were probably Quakers and lived in Taunton, Massachusetts and Springfield, Vermont. Roger Williams is a direct ancestor through a grandmother,
and another branch, the de la Fields, was traced back to England circa 1480. Lots of German and Anglo intermarriages
down the line. Though controversial, my great-great grandfather, Major Jenkins,
may have married a part Cherokee woman named Gemima;
she would thus be my great-great-grandmother. The name Jenkins is said to
be Welsh, like all kin(s) names. Family of Jen / Jon.
Robert Graves, in the White Goddess, gives an interesting derivation
of the family name via its etymology “little john” - kins
being a diminutive suffix, like munch-kins. Little
John, more than being one character in the Robin Hood mythos, was apparently
more like an occupation title, employed in festival plays performed in rural
England, like the semi-nomadic mummers dances. It was almost a status title
in the pagan hierarchy of rebels reflected in the Robin Hood ethos – the right
hand man to the chief robber; lieutenant to duke robin or something like that.
Refer to Graves
for details. Through Grandma Bea there was at least one sheriff, a Barnham who was knighted by the successor to Queen Elizabeth.
He was grandfather of the Thomas Barnham/Barnum
who came to America and settled in Danbury, CT. My father wrote a little book, called Doc
– the Life and Times of Frank Lukenbill Jenkins,
Sr., which was an homage to his father. I
converted and edited this manuscript and printed out four copies.

I’ve also seen Jenkins derived
from a Flemish source, which may be the seeming variant of the name, Jonquins. It is unknown if the Flemish form precedes the Welsh
one, and if it would even be possible to trace the family origins back to
a Flemish past. I tend to favor Welsh roots.

Recently, I was contacted by a possible distant cousin who encouraged me to
do a DNA test. We could then possibly show a shared male Jenkins ancestor
in the Jenkins "Men of Kent" county in eastern England. That group
of Jenkinses, perhaps the original group, came to England as Danes in one
of the Anglo-Saxon waves, from Friesland in coastal Netherlands & Denmark.

Heritage is always a question
of what you feel identified with. Out of the many interweaving strands which
character may be attributed to, several will manifest in any individual. I
see myself as a mystic poet and synthesis scientist, a word weaver and song
craftsman as well as a maverick thinker and geometer.I’m a creative and imaginative writer and spiritual
seeker. If the name counts for anything, I’ve chosen to use my middle name,
Major, in my nom de plume.
It is from my great-great-grandfather, born 1807, a Quaker and not a military
man. I also have a second middle name, Scott, granted at the insistence of
my sister when I was born (she being 6 at the time). Since I’ve often experienced
confusion when using the full name, people being unclear what my surname would
be, and whether it should be a hyphenated Scott-Jenkins and so on (which would
greatly mess up the cataloguing of my books), I chose to drop its use. My
ancestor and middle-name sake, Major, was a pioneer and explorer. Iin one
report he traveled the high seas for two years out of Boston in the late 1820s. He settled in Iowa—west of the Mississippi!—in the 1840s and died 1903.

So, Depp,
Jenkins, Crume, Barnum, Andersen, Riffle, Moreland,
are the immediate names that factor into my heritage.My father’s middle name, e.g., is Barnum (as
is my older brother's). My paternal grandmother’s middle name is her family
name Moreland. My paternal grandfather’s middle name is the family name Lukenbill
(southern German, means "watchers in the hills"), which was
his mother’s maiden name.